Digital, HP, and IBM had the foresight to supply NCSA with Windows NT machines with their respective not-Intel chips in them to make sure that they had a web browser on their platforms. I got the honor of using the Alpha machine, and so it got the most QA by far. I recall spending an unnecessary amount of time not only staring at the heat sink but occasionally showing it to the new guy so they could confirm my astonishment.

Having the free hardware mostly worked, but there was a long time before all of the data alignment bugs got sorted out. It got to the point where my CS classes had progressed enough that I started looking for them myself. Literally the first development tasks I got paid to do was code reviewing for word alignment bugs on 64 bit code. It was a long goddamned time ago so it's pretty fuzzy but IIRC not all 3 processors had exactly the same restrictions for all data types. So if it worked on Alpha it usually worked on the other 2 but not 100%.

I didn't have to deal with 64 bit software at work again for another 10 years, at which point people looked at me like I was trying to be edgy when I just shrugged. No, really, I was looking at 64 bit code errors 10 years ago.